Text colour contrast (4.5:1): Crawl Audit check 173

Short answer: light grey text on a white background looks elegant and is hard to read, especially on a phone in sunlight or for anyone with weaker eyesight. WCAG asks for a contrast ratio of at least 4.5 to 1 for normal text. Check 173 fails when Google's Lighthouse finds text below that.

What Crawl Audit checks

• Full audit: it reads Lighthouse's colour contrast audit. Pass if nothing fails; fail if any text does.
• Free check: contrast needs a rendered page, so the free check doesn't test it and passes. Use the full audit, or Lighthouse in Chrome DevTools.

What the sources say

• WCAG 1.4.3, level AA: text needs "a contrast ratio of at least 4.5:1", or 3:1 for large text (check 174).
• W3C: "Some people cannot read faint text." And the ratio isn't rounded: "4.499:1 would not meet the 4.5:1 threshold".
• WebAIM's 2026 survey found low-contrast text on 83.9% of the top million home pages, up from 79.1% in 2025. It was the most common problem they found.

Fixing it

• Check your grey text colours, placeholder text and text on coloured badges and buttons. These are where most failures hide.
• Use a contrast checker on each text colour against each background it sits on, including hover and highlighted states.
• Fix it in your design tokens (the shared colour variables), so every page improves at once.

On devmarde.com

On 6 October, Lighthouse scored our homepage 97 for accessibility, failing only on contrast: small grey labels in our service cards measured about 3.3:1, and some small badges about 4.0:1. We darkened our faint grey and our warning amber in the shared colour settings. A re-run the same day scored 100, with no contrast failures. This check now passes for us.

Sources

• W3C, Understanding 1.4.3 Contrast (Minimum) (updated 6 September 2026).
• WebAIM, The WebAIM Million (2026), checked 6 October 2026.